statement

My work relies on language, semiotics, history and a lexicon of conceptual ideas.

Typically, most of the work is based on real-world source material: historical quotes, appropriated images from the internet, newspapers and magazines. The work offers a freedom of reception to re-semanticize and re-contextualize cultural messages to make them function within conceptual situations of the receivers’ own derivation. For me, righting/writing the record of receptions of history is as much study, as it is an endeavor in intellectual play. This work is constructed to create a semiosic slip, a delay of meaning. The work is about how and what we can truly know about the world.

I encourage duplicity. Is there a single possible meaning in the juxtaposition of objects? The juxtaposition of ideologies? No, for meaning clearly vacillates; or as Warhol said, meaning “goes away.” Furthermore, meanings ascribed to history inevitably vary. Historical sense is made in context and subject to modification and debate. My body of work is the history of it’s own disputed meanings, which remain undecided. Different meanings exist in friction to each other. On a formal level, while Foster describes repetition as screening the traumatic real, I believe repetition is evoked to reveal the same(less)ness of meaning.

On a psychological level, I explore the possibility of a work of art existing in a relationship with its audience in a similar way to that of the analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis. As we know, a reading of a work is contingent upon the recipient’s own psychological history. Can an autonomous work of art simultaneously interrogate its subject as it interrogates itself? Can a work of art be self-reflexive?

My work focuses on the formal qualities of conceptualism, which should be read as a historical return – a moment of transference. Art is a product of an “anxiety of influence,” the concern of copying the past compounded with a need to establish an artist’s own authority, a break with that past. Thus, psychologically and culturally, repositioning is a conscious aspect of my work.

I am necessarily implicated in the transmission of “cultural capital.” [2]

Beyond Debord, it is obvious that the future of neo-capitalism is marked by a larger degree of alienation of the ‘real’ caused by a revolution in the digital, in which everything has to be de-materialized in order to be easily consumed. However, we are immediately unable to prepare ourselves for the virtual, specifically, to images that can be read as pure information, removed from their contexts. The work I make straddles the void left by a removal of a ‘real.’

Ultimately, I propose that semiology and the use of theory is a part of the artwork, or at the very least, an avenue for understanding it.